IOM Covid removing restrictions

[The Dog's Dangly Bits]

19 minutes ago, TheTeapot said:

In what way are the numbers low in Brazil? They have the second highest number of confirmed deaths of any country. Their deaths per million are higher than the UK. The whole of South America is having a very hard time of it really.

That isn't really true I'm afraid.

Worldometer confirms the rates.    Brazil about 10% more per million.  Not a huge difference. But most other LatAm countries lower than the UK.

India and Bangladesh are ridulously low.

[TheTeapot]

Just now, The Dog's Dangly Bits said:

That isn't really true I'm afraid.

Worldometer confirms the rates.    Brazil about 10% more per million.  Not a huge difference. But most other LatAm countries lower than the UK.

India and Bangladesh are ridulously low.

What isn't true? 

• They have the second highest confirmed deaths of any country - TRUE
• Their deaths per million are higher than the UK - TRUE
• The whole of South America is having a hard time of it - OK, not all of it. But a lot of it.

It was you who claimed Brazil had low numbers, which is incorrect. 

 

[pongo]

52 minutes ago, trmpton said:

I am convinced it would turn up some Positive cases in the wild and so maybe people would realise the COVID free thing isn’t going to happen and might start chilling out a bit.

If that we true we would also likely be seeing some hospital cases too.

[trmpton]

2 minutes ago, pongo said:

If that we true we would also likely be seeing some hospital cases too.

Why?

Huge numbers of people have it and never know.

If it’s as deadly and contagious as people say, there must be cases out there because based on the small number of incoming people we test we know that quite a few are coming here while positive.  I forget how many key workers they said come here but it was a lot more than the five we tested because they happened to end up in Jurby and one of them had it.

The odds on him being the only one are minute.

[AcousticallyChallenged]

1 minute ago, trmpton said:

Why?

Huge numbers of people have it and never know.

If it’s as deadly and contagious as people say, there must be cases out there because based on the small number of incoming people we test we know that quite a few are coming here while positive.  I forget how many key workers they said come here but it was a lot more than the five we tested because they happened to end up in Jurby and one of them had it.

The odds on him being the only one are minute.

Surely though, there's an element, especially for returning residents of not shitting where you eat.

It's a small island, a bit too Hot Fuzz sometimes but when you know everyone and their dog will snitch, you tend to be a bit more careful and very much don't want to be patient zero of a community outbreak.

It's pretty much guaranteed that the welder isn't the only key worker and other residents have come back with it too, but, if the distancing is implemented, who else can actually catch it? Surely it's more telling that we've not had any community cases because we're effectively breaking the chain of transmission?

[Andy Onchan]

3 minutes ago, trmpton said:

Why?

Huge numbers of people have it and never know.

If it’s as deadly and contagious as people say, there must be cases out there because based on the small number of incoming people we test we know that quite a few are coming here while positive.  I forget how many key workers they said come here but it was a lot more than the five we tested because they happened to end up in Jurby and one of them had it.

The odds on him being the only one are minute.

But may be the others did what they were required to do in accordance with the regulations and obeyed our laws, go straight to their digs and then straight to their job and back to their digs.

The Famous Five didn't.

That's the difference.

[Roger Mexico]

3 minutes ago, pongo said:

56 minutes ago, trmpton said:

I am convinced it would turn up some Positive cases in the wild and so maybe people would realise the COVID free thing isn’t going to happen and might start chilling out a bit.

If that we true we would also likely be seeing some hospital cases too.

It wouldn't even need to be people badly affected enough to be admitted to hospital - just someone with enough symptoms to get worried and ring 111 to get tested would be enough.  I've always said that we should do more testing in part because it would pick up a new outbreak in the community earlier, but there's no way in which a re-infection could be being passed around for months without it being picked up.

[Banker]

37 minutes ago, Andy Onchan said:

But may be the others did what they were required to do in accordance with the regulations and obeyed our laws, go straight to their digs and then straight to their job and back to their digs.

The Famous Five didn't.

That's the difference.

You wouldn’t know if they obeyed rules as no one is checking up on them as Howie was asked this question last week and didn’t know!

As long as they didn’t have face masks on & didn’t say they were over from UK no one would notice if they were in pub or not

[Roger Mexico]

1 hour ago, The Dog's Dangly Bits said:

That isn't really true I'm afraid.

Worldometer confirms the rates.    Brazil about 10% more per million.  Not a huge difference. But most other LatAm countries lower than the UK.

India and Bangladesh are ridulously low.

According to Worldometers, Brazil is currently sixth highest in deaths per million - and two of those above it (San Marino and Andorra) are tiddlers.  It's true that its rate is only 10% worse than the UK's, but that's because the UK is at #12.  Being slightly less shit than Brazil is not really something to be bragging about. 

Of course with the UK at #12 and about 26-33 countries in Latin America having over half of them above the UK would be rather difficult but six of them are, and there are among the biggest.

India is densely populated and urbanising fast, but it is still 66% rural.  And like other developing countries such as Brazil, there will be substantial under-recording of deaths, especially among the poor, something that in both cases will encouraged by  right-wing governments which have been keen to play down the importance of the pandemic.

[Andy Onchan]

4 minutes ago, Banker said:

You wouldn’t know if they obeyed rules as no one is checking up on them as Howie was asked this question last week and didn’t know!

As long as they didn’t have face masks on & didn’t say they were over from UK no one would notice if they were in pub or not

It does happen. My niece who arrived two weeks ago last Thursday was called three times during her two weeks isolation and visited twice. My next door neighbour who isolated for the first week got a visit during that week and then went on to pay the £50. She had a negative test result and returned to work this morning after semi-isolation for the second week.

[Roger Mexico]

9 minutes ago, Banker said:

You wouldn’t know if they obeyed rules as no one is checking up on them as Howie was asked this question last week and didn’t know!

As long as they didn’t have face masks on & didn’t say they were over from UK no one would notice if they were in pub or not

Well except that people would probably ask if they came across a group of guys with non-local accents who they hadn't seen before - as happened in Tesco.  I suppose they could have lied and claimed they had been self-isolating for 14 days, but they might than have go found out in later conversation.

[Max Power]

1 minute ago, Roger Mexico said:

Well except that people would probably ask if they came across a group of guys with non-local accents who they hadn't seen before -

That's half of the IoM then, it's hard to hear a true Manx accent anywhere these days. 

[manxman34]

6 minutes ago, Max Power said:

That's half of the IoM then, it's hard to hear a true Manx accent anywhere these days. 

Used to be able to distinguish southsiders by their accent, but no longer so. Douglas has always sounded half Scouse, but now it's more diverse. Remember the old people who said qwhere instead of where?

[monasqueen]

2 hours ago, Utah 01 said:

The statistics are crystal clear.  For the vast majority of the population this virus is a relative non-event.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/12/not-cases-covid-created-equal/

But everyone seems scared to put out any figures. Some people have suggested that 99% of the population gets through it. That means that 1% die. Convert that to our Island's population, and over 800 people will die. A much larger number will have been through hospital (or been treated in the car park, because of lack of space) and a substantial number will be left with "long covid".

Is that what you want?

None of the people who are arguing for "freedom" has any idea what to do to stop the virus killing loads of people.

Argue all you like, but until someone can come up with a plan that will work, we are probably better off doing the will of the experts who are advising government.

The Torygraph article says nothing at all that will help.

It is a commonplace of science, medicine and everyday life that in order to solve a problem you must first of all frame it correctly. If you ask the right questions, finding solutions can be straightforward. But if you ask the wrong ones you can grope in the dark forever. So having the right perspective really matters.

Unfortunately, the Government’s Covid approach has all the hallmarks of groping in the dark. In the name of “keeping everyone safe” we have endured local and national lockdowns, social distancing, masks, curfews, shutting cafés and pubs. Now we face further restrictions, based on naive modelling and virtually no evidence.

Our societal response doesn’t seem to have advanced much since 1665, the year of the Great Plague. Getting the framing wrong then cost many lives. If you believe (as people did) that plague is caused by corrupted air, not by a bacterium, you will take the wrong actions and make things worse. The authorities locked ill people in their homes with all who lived there, increasing overall mortality several-fold. Believing, paradoxically, that dogs and cats spread the plague, they arranged widespread culls, facilitating spread through a burgeoning rat population and their attendant fleas.

Funnily enough, Covid is actually carried on the air, so at least we have understood that bit correctly. But there has been a dangerous mission-creep since March. Then we were told a three-week lockdown was needed to stop the NHS being overwhelmed. But this has metamorphosed from the ugly caterpillar of protecting the NHS into the even uglier maggot of controlling case numbers. The wrong framing is that “case numbers” are being equated with “positive” tests.

What is a “case” of Covid? Let’s say you developed a viral cold last winter. Were you a “case” of a viral respiratory infection? On a theoretical level the answer must be yes. But on a practical, real-world level, the answer is no: you went to work and carried on with life. You were invisible to the authorities. Let’s say it got a bit worse and you saw your GP. Still no. You decided to take a couple of days off. Still no – you might show up in sick leave statistics, but not as a case of respiratory infection. If you got so far as being admitted to hospital with serious illness, you would show up as a “case” – a tiny proportion of those who actually had the illness.

The contrast with today is clear. Covid was made a notifiable disease in February, obliging all “cases” to be reported to the authorities. Since the only way to identify Covid is with a lab test, positive tests have been equated with positive “cases”. Back then, it was claimed there were no asymptomatic cases, but we now know that 90 per cent or more of people have Covid asymptomatically. A positive test is clearly not a positive “case”.

We also know that Covid affects different groups of people very differently: there is a thousand-fold difference in the severity of the disease between young and old. So the meaning of a positive test cannot be equated with its meaning in March, because the incidence of the disease at present has a completely different demographic.

Then there’s the issue of the tests themselves. Plausible false positive rates make up a substantial proportion of “positives” as unverified mass testing is rapidly rolled out. There is profound uncertainty around what low viral titres – found in a high proportion of young asymptomatic people – mean. Most probably very low infectivity. T-cell (as opposed to antibody) testing indicates that many people already have resistance to the virus. The more we know about this virus, the more it is like viruses we are already familiar with.

And yet, the Government is looking for an easy way out of the complex mass of restrictions they have devised; “control” the “cases” and wait for a vaccine to save the day. Unfortunately the former is a classic example of rubbish in, rubbish out, and the latter is unlikely to happen effectively, given previous attempts.

It’s time for the Government to start asking the right questions; framing things in the light of accumulating evidence, not unexamined preconceptions. On that basis, the course we should be taking is clear: asymptomatic spread is good. Advise and help the very elderly and those with serious illnesses to shield if they wish – but do not compel them, it’s their life, after all. And let everyone else get completely back to normal.

[Banker]

25 minutes ago, Roger Mexico said:

Well except that people would probably ask if they came across a group of guys with non-local accents who they hadn't seen before - as happened in Tesco.  I suppose they could have lied and claimed they had been self-isolating for 14 days, but they might than have go found out in later conversation.

You obviously haven’t been in a pub recently! Try Jaks on a football night & see if you can distinguish where everyone is from!